As she got closer to the helo pad in the aft of the yacht, her goggles completely blurry with rain and fog, she kept her right hand at the release clip ready to hit the deck.
Then for some reason she jerked upward and then quickly downward, bouncing her off the deck, her arms instinctively flaying out to grasp anything. Big mistake. Pain shot through her right leg and to her left shoulder, which had taken the majority of the crash.
Laying on the deck, she looked up and saw the Seahawk closing in on her. If she didn’t move it might crash into her. But instead she clicked out of the cable and shoved both arms up into the air, her thumbs giving the signal she was free.
With that, the pilot twisted his aircraft to the north and pulled up toward the sky, the cable whipping behind it like a long tail.
Toni immediately felt the swaying of the yacht in the heavy seas, the wind and rain pelting her into submission. Within seconds two men were at either side of her helping her to her feet. But she couldn’t place any weight onto her right leg. Her ankle was shot. But the men practically carried her toward a door, their progress hampered by the rocking deck.
Inside, the atmosphere changed from the drastic to the dramatically opulent. Leather benches lined one wall and matching plush white leather chairs sat across from those. At the far end was a bar, which seemed to be locked down now so the bottles wouldn’t go flying around.
She sat onto a bench and removed her helmet, goggles and then slipped out of the nylon harness. Then she removed her small backpack, and set it on the bench next to her.
An older man appeared from another room and she recognized Petros Caras from his Agency file. “That was quite a dramatic entrance,” he said, with only a slight British accent.
Toni rubbed her ankle lightly, but she could barely touch it without extreme pain. This wasn’t good. “I’m afraid I’ve broken my ankle.”
“I’m so sorry Miss Contardo,” the Greek said.
“Toni, please.”
“Toni. I don’t have a doctor aboard, but I do have a man who was a medic in the Greek army. He can at least put that ankle in a walking cast.”
She nodded. “That would be great.”
Petros Caras turned to his two men and said something to them in Greek. Then he switched back to Toni. “They will take you to a compartment and I’ll have our man come to you with his medical equipment. Once he’s done, they’ll bring you to me and we can take care of our business.”
One of the men went to pick up her backpack and Toni grasped it before he could. She slung it over her shoulder and took the man’s arm to help her up. “Thanks,” she said.
“These men don’t speak English,” the Greek billionaire said. “Our medic speaks only a little English.”
She nodded and the two men helped her to her room. When they set her onto the bed, she glanced around the compartment, which looked like a high-end room on a cruise ship.
Once the men were gone, she opened her backpack and found her satellite phone. She tried to turn it on, but it wouldn’t fire up. Then she shook the phone and heard something rattling around inside. Great. That’s what had broken her fall when she smashed the deck against her shoulder. She still had her cell phone, but, as she suspected, there was no service. Then she found both of her guns and made sure they were still all right. No problem. She shoved the guns back into the pack when she heard a slight knock on her door.
“Come in,” she said.
The man who came in was an extremely handsome Greek with dark hair and a short beard trimmed along a strong chiseled jaw. He couldn’t have been more than thirty-years-old and might have had another career as a model. He carried a large bag and set it on the deck next to the bed. If she had to have someone work on her body, this man would do nicely, she thought.
“You speak English?” Toni asked.
“A little.”
“Parlate italiano?” She knew that a lot of Greeks also spoke Italian.
“Si,”
So the two of them spoke Italian as this man took off her boot and sock and examined her ankle with a gentle touch. He seemed very concerned.
“I believe it is broken,” he said in Italian.
“Hey, at least the bone isn’t sticking out. Do you have casting material?”
“Yes, but the swelling is too great right now. We will have to put a temporary cast on it for now. Then if you are still with us, I will cast it.”
She was only supposed to be aboard the yacht until they got into port in Siracusa. She could wait for the cast until then. “I can wait on the cast. But do you have anything for the pain?”
“Si.” He pulled out a bottle of pills with no indication of what they were and gave her two. Then he went to a small refrigerator and found a bottle of water for her.
“What are these?” she asked.
He said something in Greek and then smiled. Then he tried to figure out the term in Italian but it wasn’t coming to him. He finally settled on English and said, “Tylenol with codeine.”
“Nice.” She could live with that.
First he placed some ice around her ankle to bring down the swelling. While they waited they talked about many different things. Toni was able to ask without seeming to interrogate, but she knew she would get much more straight information from this man by just making small talk. He told her everywhere they had gone in the past month. When it seemed to him that she might be flirting with him, he told Toni he was gay. She said that was too bad and smiled at him, even though he was almost young enough to be her son. Before this gorgeous young Greek left her cabin, he wiped down the cold, wet ankle and then put it into a walking cast. He said he would bring her some crutches later, but she should lay down with her leg up for a while first.
Alone in her bed, she lay now and thought about how she wanted to approach this Greek billionaire. He was obviously used to doing things his own way, getting whatever his money could buy. But the Agency had made him and he needed to remember this. Damn, she hated having to clean up messes from before her time.
21
Instead of dumping the Fiat, Jake and Elisa had decided to keep it for a while. They did disable the GPS, though, once Jake realized he had screwed up by not doing so sooner. He made a calculated decision that the Greeks and the Mafia men wouldn’t have the resources to track them by GPS, but he had been wrong. He hadn’t realized just how tight the Mafia was with the Polizia in Sicily. This bad choice had gotten Sara kidnapped and almost gotten him killed. He wouldn’t take them lightly again. Besides disabling the GPS, they swapped out the license plates with another Fiat of the same year, make and color. This model of Fiat was like a white Ford truck in Texas — everyone had one.
Jake was able to get a call in to his old friend at the Agency, Kurt Jenkins, who had risen now to the DCI position. His conversation had been somewhat stilted. The man wasn’t being entirely truthful, Jake knew. Kurt might be able to fool any congressional inquiry with his rhetoric and eloquence of tongue, but Jake knew the man far too long to know when he was blowing smoke out of his ass. Jake had told the man about his case and how he needed the position of the yacht owned by the Greek billionaire Petros Caras. The Agency director seemed to anticipate Jake’s needs. Yeah, he knew more than he wanted Jake to understand. Kurt Jenkins cut the call short, saying he would get back with Jake soon.
That call was about fifteen minutes ago, while Elisa was inside a small corner store in the seaside town of Augusta, some ten miles north of Siracusa. Jake was familiar with this town since it housed a fairly large Italian Navy complex, along with U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet port with tankers and munitions replenishment facilities.